Richard St. John’s TED Talk on Success. Is it nothing but delusion?
I was just watching a TED talk by Richard St. John on the 8 Rules of Success. Richard interviewed 500 TED attendees to distill down eight principles. His recommendations are depressingly trite: have passion, work hard, yada, yada, yada. You can see the talk here: http://bit.ly/6VxMaC
It’s not his fault his results are trite, however. As discussed at great length in The Halo Effect
That means, sadly, that such answers are meaningless. If you ask someone who’s a known success how they got that way, they’ll say it was vision, passion, hard work, etc. If you ask their friends, the friends will say vision, passion, hard work, etc. If you ask someone who’s a failure how they got that way, you’ll also get the same stories over and over. Humans seem to have built-in explanations for such things.
Among what’s missing is any interview with people who had vision, passion, and worked hard, and failed. Why? Because those people can’t afford the absurdly high price tag to attend TED, so Richard didn’t interview them. It may be that for every 100 people who have vision, passion, and work hard, 99 of them end up burned out, divorced, and miserable, and only one goes on to be successful. But by selecting only the successful ones to interview, it’s easy to conclude that those traits correlate with success.
A simpler example: every one of the successful TED attendees drank either mother’s milk or formula as a baby. Does that mean that drinking mother’s milk or formula leads to success? Not at all. It just means that pretty much everyone drinks those things as babies.
I know some very rich finance people. Their vision? Nil. Really Nil. Like, no imagination whatsoever. Their passion? To show off and impress the neighbors. Their hard work? Signing checks. It’s tough if it’s not special 24-bond paper made for smooth writing. And then all that waiting and waiting! Years of playing golf, waiting while thousands of people work their butts off so the providers of capital can walk off with the profits (that’s what “capitalism” means–providers of capital get the rewards). In short, I know many example of people who don’t have all those nice, feel-good attributes, and are even more successful than many who do.
Since Richard St. John is giving his talks to high school students, he is in the perfect position to do a real experiment to find out what leads to success. Have half of the students he talks to do the things he recommends. Have them work hard, have vision, and so on. The other half? Have them slack off and meander through life. In twenty year’s we’ll be able to see whether or not there’s a real correlation between his recommendations and subsequent success.
Interesting thought,
Having watched that same video before, I never looked at it from that angle. I’m intrigued by the Halo effect and will pick up Rosenzweig’s book. Is the Halo effect partly due to the culture surrounding success? Do the more times we hear a successful individual credit a supportive family/friends, or a lucky break make us more likely to send those same messages if we were being interviewed?
On the note of the high school experiment, their are going to be “Outliers”, those who are extremely “successful” (ex. rich finance people) but their success is due to the fact that they grew up in a certain time period, inherited a family business, were lucky enough to be born into a middle class family that valued education, etc.. Just read Malcom Gladwell’s book Outliers and highly recommend it. It gives you a new perspective when looking at “success” and the outliers of today’s society.
Thanks, Ryan Dawidjan [ryandawidjan.posterous.com]
December 26th, 2009 at 1:05 amIts called the Narrative Fallacy. For anything that happens, people will naturally generate a story that explains what caused the action to happen. Even if the thing that happened was completely random, constructing an explanative narrative ex post facto will result in a very plausible story. Unfortunately, that story will not necessarily be true.
There is an interesting book, “The Black Swan” about how randomness interacts with everyday stories, particularly financial in nature. The author, Nassim Taleb, is unbelievably obnoxious but has a lot of good things to say. I recommend it.
February 1st, 2010 at 11:43 pm